A Cultural Read on the Representation of Elevators
If we are to believe Youtube, the authorial social archive of film footage, then the representation of the elevator in media is that of a fascinating “hotspot” for the traveler avoiding the stairs. We can conduct a quick survey that deposits a long list of thumbnail clip options on the popular website’s search page; and, while the drama that unfolds in the small space of each elevator is seemingly varied, closer inspection yields indubitable universality in this structure.
For the elevator in film and television promises the allure of fear and fantasy, often within the same breath or within the span of a five-minute scene. One anime clip depicts two wide-eyed characters, trapped in an elevator by some scepter-wielding sorcerer. With another wave of his scepter, an incantation, and a shift in music, part of the elevator’s floor breaks away and the cartoon girl mysteriously floats towards the cavernous hole and falls down, down, down. The falling sequence repeats, the boy screams, but suddenly the girl comes floating back up sitting on a winged, glowing pink sphere. She is saved, and they embrace. The sorcerer restores the elevator and the colors resume from gothic grays to bright pastels as the doors slide open so the hero and heroine may exit.
This general form is mutated and carried out in Topgun, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Shallow Hal, and many other films. Fears and fantasies at every turn or rather, between every floor. For that is the quality of these elevator representations: time is short between floors and buttons; the allure of the affair, of the promotion, of the entrapment, has only minutes at best to manifest itself. The tension, or suspension, for these matters to arise mirrors even the mechanics of the vessel; it’s up and down limbo of transit echoing the rollercoaster expectations of the people within.
Another observation of elevator scenes: elevator etiquette. The sliding metal doors meet across to their frame, containing the traveler. There is never enough space, but the space there is well balanced-- that is, the space between each stander and waiter is kept perfectly equal. For example, one clip from Spiderman II, shows that small side step an original passenger makes to accommodate the new boarder, in this case Peter Parker. And there are more rules. Everyone knows them and the implications of breaching them. They concern the etiquettes of door holding, stifling one’s cough, and small talk when it is necessary.
Ultimately, this politeness in movies and television clips is a precaution taken in the name of elevator fears and elevator fantasies. Either one will be trapped in the elevator with strangers “using up all the oxygen” as one panicked character in a video states, or in open fire like The Departed or Star Wars Episode III, or one will be trapped in a romantic encounter, however bizarre (consider Jim Carrey’s character in the elevator in Liar, Liar who can not repress his comments on a woman’s large breasts). So in case of these circumstances, it is most advantageous to be on one’s best behavior!
It may be argued that elevators are not just hotspots, but places of diffusion as well. The “awkward moments” of elevator scenes are easily a familiar and identifiable quality of elevator clips. In television series Grey’s Anatomy, “Dr McDreamy” encounters an elevator ride with his ex-girlfriend and ex-wife. Needless to say, not a word is spoken in the course of the clip except for a co-worker mumbling in McDreamy’s ear, “I bet you wish you had taken the stairs right now.” However, whatever “awkward moment” that is captured in these elevator representations, besides used as a source of humor, is also used as an indicator of all the elevator fears and elevator fantasies that go unsaid (in other words, the fear of being cornered with these women, and the fantasy of their past affairs). These awkward elevator moments then only strengthen and support the notion of these fears and fantasies.
But before we think that we have reached any conclusions here by observing scenes of elevators, noting their linear movements as objects on the y-axis of the coordinate plane, and otherwise drawing all the limits around the elevator and performing to the elevator what the elevator does to us: box us in— let us last consider the Great Glass Elevator in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
In this text, one may find an elevator that all at once escapes, defies, and reinforces the expectations of other representations of elevators. It zooms forwards, backwards, and sideways—it is the exception that proves the rule. In Chapter 28 of the children’s novel, Willy Wonka, Charlie, and his Grandpa Joe whiz toward the ceiling of the chocolate factory. In their platonic ascent, the glass elevator shatters though the ceiling and “rockets” into the sky, despite Grandpa’s Joe’s fears and misgivings. “The elevator has gone mad!” he cries at one point. Yet the elevator makes the cross over and the sunlight streams in through the transparent walls as the passengers admire the view from “a thousand feet up (145).”
What fuels this remarkable elevator but the same fears and fantasies that recycle through Youtube’s endless march of representations-- and the final wish that despite our fears, we may fly, no strings attached, on candy power.
Works Cited/Works Consulted
Barthes, Roland. Acts of Cultural Criticism. Ed. Frank Lentricchia and Andrew Dubois. Close Reading The Reader. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2003. 216-25. Print.
Michel, Foucault. "Of Other Spaces." 1967. MS. Berlin.
Roald., Dahl,. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. New York: Puffin, 2007. Print.
"YouTube - elevator scenes." YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. Web. 16 Dec. 2009.
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